EA Staffer Not Liking EA's New Restrictive DRM

Current editor-in-chief of EA.com Jeff Green, who has a long history with the Ziff-Davis publishing company, is making it public that he's not a fan of the new DRM scheme that EA has chosen to protect Command & Conquer 4.

Green, an employee of Electronic Arts, made it known through is Twitter stream that he's experiencing a problem with playing through C&C4 not because of a problem with the master server
(as is the case with Ubisoft's customer woes) but because of a less-than-reliable DSL connection at home.

[t850]

Hopefully such comments and bad sales will make these developers learn the hard way.

[champ21]

lol both AC2 and C&C are off steams tops sellers list, they just rolled out. I guess both the games were not well received.

[Aphe]

While piracy is an issue obviously, the way they're going about it with this DRM business now is just over the top. I remember when Valve first bought in its internet activation and I was pretty annoyed about that at the time because I barely had the cash to pay to have internet at home.

But at least it was just a one time thing, once it was done you didn't have to worry about being online. This is something else entirely and I'm worried how far this is going to go. If it's successful a lot of other companies may go the same way.

[steve30x]

Im sure it wont be succesful because I see a lot of outcry over this DRM and a lot of people wont buy the games with this DRM. Also on the Ubisoft forum there is a whole lot of people who cant play Settlers 7 because the DRM is telling them that they arent connected to the internet when their internet is working perfectly.

[fcpthebest]

I just cannot believe people bought these games :$

PC gaming is getting worse. I have a pc and atm I just refuse to pay for games that have drm. The only game that I payed for was mount and blade.

[thehitman]

Product keys?? Blizzard has product keys so that only 1 purchase can be played on the net at a time and cant even install it w/o a vaild 1, so even if you pirate the game all you can do is the campaign mode which isnt much.

[BannedForNineYears]

Derrrrp, any game you pirate you can only play Single Player, unless of course you play on cracked servers.
As for needing a serial, that's what keygens/cracked .dll files are for.
Not that I would know or anything. >_>

[palaeomerus]

I think presuming your customers will have perfect or even reliable internet is kind of stupid.

A friend of mine recently bought Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition and I came over to play it coop with him, specifically the two new mini-campaigns.

It turned out to be plain old Resident Evil 5 in a different box with a card letting you download the DLC from Xboxlive and that DLC turned out to be over a 1GB.

So my friend thought he was getting a better version of the game with all the DLC included ON DISC so he wouldn't have to do all of that, and he had to make an Xbox live silver account AND the crap took forever to download which ruined the whole point of me coming over.

So if I buy Gears of War 2: Game of the year edition is that going to work the same way? Is it the same old product and a download code on a card? If so it's hardly worth buying again is it? It would make more sense to just buy or ignore he DLC and stick with my old copy. the whole point of a deluxe edition is to have the new stuff on hand on a disc that will work without the internet or downloads (which will eventually go away as the game ages).

Publishers really need to make it so that their game will work out of the box without an internet connection or else NOTICEABLY mark the exterior of the product as being 'next to useless' without an internet connection or else they risk severely disappointing and angering a pretty large group of their customers.

[kraze07]

The DRM was the reason I didn't buy C&C4.

[jakethesnake]

You and me both.